The present invention generally relates to email management, and more specifically, to a method and system for monitoring email and website behavior of an email recipient.
Due to their convenience and popularity, emails have become a major channel for communications amongst individuals and businesses. Since emails can be used to reach a much wider audience in a short period of time, emails have also been utilized regularly as a tool in marketing campaigns. There is a number of email marketing companies which have established a market for tracked email campaigns. These companies provide feedback to the email sender when an email was opened by its intended recipient. Generally, this is accomplished via the inclusion of a ‘web beacon’ (or a single-pixel gif) which is uniquely coded and linked to the particular recipient of the email. More specifically, in order to generate and send emails for a tracked campaign, an end user goes through a multi-step workflow that typically includes: (1) recipient list creation/selection—loading into a mass-mail tool a list of possible recipients and creating a recipient list containing selected recipients for a particular campaign; (2) template authoring—using the mass-mail tool to author the HTML email according to one or more predefined templates; and (3) mail merge and execution (send)—merging the recipient list into the predefined templates, thereby creating separate emails which contain unique tracking codes in the form of references to an image on a remote server. These emails are then sent by a mail bursting engine. When the recipient opens the email in an HTML-enabled email client, the email client contacts the remote server to retrieve the desired image. Because each image is uniquely coded, the remote server is able to track when the email intended for a particular recipient was opened.
The foregoing method of tracking status of an email for a marketing campaign has its shortcomings, however. For example, a list of specific recipients whose behavior is to be monitored needs to be created or identified prior to the creation of the emails. Furthermore, while some technologies exist to monitor behavior of an email recipient, such as, whether an email has been opened, who clicked through via an email and what part of a website an individual has visited, there is relatively little correlation between the behavior of the email recipient and the sender. Hence, it would be desirable to provide a method and system that is capable of monitoring behavior of an email recipient in relation to a sender.
Moreover, the conventional way of processing and distributing emails makes it difficult to monitor the individual behavior of an email recipient. Typically, an email server processes emails on a per-recipient-domain basis. For example, if a user sends an email to three recipients respectively identified by three email addresses: a@one.com, b@one.com, and c@two.com, then the user's email server will split the single email on the basis of unique recipient domains (in this case, one.com and two.com) and process accordingly. In this example, the user's email server would connect to the email server for one.com and deliver a single copy of the email. It is then up to the email server for one.com to create and deliver two copies of the email to both a@one.com and b@one.com simultaneously. The user's email server would also separately connect to the email server for two.com and deliver a separate copy of the email to c@two.com. Since emails are processed on a per-recipient-domain basis, respective behavior of the recipients within a single domain is difficult to monitor. It is not unusual for a single domain to have thousands, if not millions, of recipients. Therefore, it would also be desirable to provide a method and system that is capable of monitoring behavior of email recipients within a single domain.